A riveting look into the world of James Bond and his creator, published on the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth.
In "For Your Eyes Only," Ben Macintyre reveals where the world of Ian Fleming ends and the world of James Bond begins. Macintyre looks at the actual people on whom the writer based his fictional creations--friends, colleagues, lovers, and, of course, the notorious villains. Exploring the tradition of spy fiction past and present, with specific attention to the Cold War, Macintyre explains how Bond was based on the realities--and fantasies--of Fleming's life as a wartime spymaster and peacetime bon vivant.
Stylishly illustrated, "For Your Eyes Only" features a collector's dream of gadgets, costumes, props, and storyboards from the films--Daniel Craig's bloodstained shirt from Casino Royale, the Aston Martin DB5, complete with weaponry--as well as memorabilia from Fleming's personal archive: his smoking jacket, the manuscript for "Casino Royale," his golden typewriter, his guns, and much more.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carre In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

Kerry Bolton's Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence is a study of ten leading twentieth-century literary artists-including pioneering modernists-who were sympathetic with Fascism and/or National Socialism: D. H. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti, W. B. Yeats, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, and Roy Campbell. Bolton relates their political commitments to their lives, their art, and their economic, religious, and philosophical convictions. In lucid, driving prose, Kerry Bolton utterly demolishes some of the sturdiest prejudices of the liberal mind.

Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated account of of Tove Jansson's life and art The definitive biography of one of the most unique and beloved children's authors of the 20th century, the creator of the Moomins. Tove Jansson (1914-2001) led a long, colourful and productive life, impacting significantly the political, social and cultural history of 20th-century Finland. And while millions of children have grown up with Little My, Snufkin, Moomintroll and the many creatures of Moominvalley, the life of Jansson - daughter, friend and companion - is more touching still. This book weaves together the myriad qualities of a painter, author, illustrator, scriptwriter and lyricist from fraught beginnings through fame, war and heartbreak and ultimately to a peaceful end. Dr Tuula Karjalainen is a Finnish art historian and non-fiction writer who has previously worked as a director of the Helsinki Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. As the author of Tove Jansson's biography, Karjalainen has become an expert not only on Jansson's writing and art but also on her decades of personal correspondence and journals.

'An intimate portrait ... Critical, generous and heartfelt' Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian 'An intriguing account of an alluring but evasive character' Daily Telegraph Drawing on extensive archival sources and hundreds of interviews, Timothy Brennan's Places of Mind is the first comprehensive biography of Said, one of the most controversial and celebrated intellectuals of the 20th century. In Brennan's masterful work, Said, the pioneer of post-colonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, and eloquent advocate of literature's dramatic effects on politics and civic life. Places of Mind charts the intertwined routes of Said's intellectual development, revealing him as a study in opposites: a cajoler and strategist, a New York intellectual with a foot in Beirut, an orchestra impresario in Weimar and Ramallah, a raconteur on national television, a Palestinian negotiator at the State Department, and an actor in films in which he played himself. Brennan traces the Arab influences of Said's thinking along with his tutelage under Lebanese statesmen, off-beat modernist auteurs, and New York literati, as Said grew into a scholar whose influential writings changed the face of university life forever. With both intimidating brilliance and charm, Said turned these resources into a groundbreaking counter-tradition of radical humanism, set against the backdrop of techno-scientific dominance and religious war. With unparalleled clarity, Said gave the humanities a new authority in the age of Reaganism that continues today. Drawing on the testimonies of family, friends, students, and antagonists alike, and aided by FBI files, unpublished writing, and Said's drafts of novels and personal letters, Places of Mind captures Said's intellectual breadth and influence in an unprecedented, intimate, and compelling portrait of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood 'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War; from his prescient critique of Stalin to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism, Solnit finds a more hopeful Orwell, whose love of nature pulses through his work and actions. And in her dialogue with the author, she makes fascinating forays into colonial legacies in the flower garden, discovers photographer Tina Modotti's roses, reveals Stalin's obsession with growing lemons in impossibly cold conditions, and exposes the brutal rose industry in Colombia. A fresh reading of a towering figure of the 20th century which finds solace and solutions for the political and environmental challenges we face today, Orwell's Roses is a remarkable reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance. 'Luminous...It is efflorescent, a study that seeds and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations' New Statesman 'A genuinely extraordinary mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded' Irish Times

One of the world’s bestselling storytellers, Lesley Pearse appears to have everything. But heartbreak has scarred her life . . .

Born during the Second World War, Lesley’s innocence came to an abrupt end when a neighbour found her, aged 3, coatless in the snow. The mother she’d been unable to wake had been dead for days. Sent to an orphanage, Lesley soon learned adults couldn’t always be trusted.

As a teenager in the swinging sixties, she took herself to London. Here, the second great tragedy of her life occurred. Falling pregnant, she was sent to a mother and baby home, and watched helplessly as her newborn was taken from her.

But like so many of her generation, Lesley had to carry on. Marriage and children followed – and all the while she nurtured a dream: to be a writer. Yet it wasn’t until at the age of 48 that her stories – of women struggling in a difficult world – found a publisher, and the bestseller lists beckoned.

As heartbreaking as it is heartwarming, Lesley’s story really is A Long and Winding Road with surprises and a little hope around every corner . . .

Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014) accomplished a great deal in his long life, working in magazine publishing, including a stint for Playboy, and writing science fiction novels such as The Power, The Dark Beyond the Stars, and thrillers such as The Glass Inferno (filmed as The Towering Inferno). Robinson also passionately engaged in politics, fighting for gay rights, and most famously writing speeches for his good friend Harvey Milk in San Francisco. This deeply personal autobiography explains the life of one gay man over eight decades in America and contains personal photos. By turns witty, charming, and poignant, this memoir grants insights into Robinson's work not just as a journalist and writer, but as a gay man navigating the often perilous social landscape of twentieth-century life in the United States. The bedrock sincerity and painful honesty with which he describes this life makes Not So Good a Gay Man compelling reading.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

"This work will change our understanding of Coleridge's politics and how we read his oeuvre." Dr. Michael John Kooy (Warwick University, U.K.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality. Meticulously researched and including newly discovered archival materials, Coleridge's Laws provides detailed analysis of the laws and public notices drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources Hough and Davis identify the political challenges facing Coleridge and reveal that, in attempting to win over the Maltese public to support Britain's strategic interests, Coleridge was complicit in acts of government which were both inconsistent with the the rule of law and contrary to his professed beliefs. Coleridge's willingness to overlook accepted legal processes and personal misgivings for political expediency is disturbing and, as explained by Michael John Kooy's in his extensive Introduction, necessarily alters our understanding of the author and his writing. Coleridge's Laws contributes in new ways to the current debates about Coleridge's achievements, British colonialism and its engagement with the rule of law, nationhood and the effectiveness of the British administration of Malta. It provides essential reading for anybody interested in Coleridge specifically and the Romantics more generally, for political and legal historians and for students of colonial government.

In recent years, under pressure from New Historicism and developments in the formal study of biography, scholars have become increasingly conscious of how deliberately fashioned were the images of Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth. In Byron's case, this was often with his consent or collusion; in Shelley's case, it was the active efforts of his widow and friends who struggled to construct a particular picture of both man and poet. With Wordsworth the picture is less clear, since the kind of scrutiny that his two counterparts have recently received has rarely extended to him. The memoirs in this collection are written by those who had personal knowledge of Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, or who claimed to be recording the accounts of those who had such knowledge. Each volume in this set contains the original memoirs in facsimile together with introductions and headnotes. The headnotes set the relevant context for each document, cross-referencing controversial passages.

George Eliot (1819-1880) was one of the leading writers of the Victorian period and she remains one of Britain's greatest novelists. This brief life offers new insights into Eliot's life and work focusing on the themes, patterns, relationships, feelings and language common to both her life and writing. Barbara Hardy discusses Eliot's relations with parents and siblings, her brave but joyful unmarried partnership with George Henry Lewes, her friendships and her late brief marriage to the younger John Cross. Setting her life and fiction side by side, Hardy reveals Eliot's ideas about society, home, foreignness, nature, gender, religion, sex, illness and death and her experiences as translator, journalist, editor and novelist. Drawing on letters, journals, journalism and the memoirs and biographies written by contemporaries, Hardy brings together a biographical approach with close reading of Eliot's novels to give a combined perspective on her life and art. This book offers students, academics and readers alike an illuminating portrait of George Eliot as a woman and a writer.

'In the first decade of the twentieth century, it was not a good time to be born black, or woman, in America.' So begins this stunning portrait of Vivian Baxter Johnson: the first black woman officer in the Merchant Marines, purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, and mother to Maya Angelou, beloved and bestselling author I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS. 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Anyone who's read the classic, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, knows Maya Angelou was raised by her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away and unearths the well of emotions Angelou experienced long afterward as a result. While Angelou's six autobiographies tell of her out in the world, influencing and learning from statesmen and cultural icons, Mom & Me & Mom shares the intimate, emotional story about her own family. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

This is the first scholarly edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives since 1898, the first to include the complete text of the three Brief Lives manuscripts (including censored and deleted material, title pages, antiquarian notes, and the indices), and the first to provide a full general and critical introduction and comprehensive commentary. This edition is the first to respect the original arrangement of the Lives in Aubrey's manuscripts. Brief Lives is presented as an antiquarian and collaborative text, containing the autograph papers of biographical subjects, the annotations of those among whom the manuscripts circulated, and wax seals. As well as 25 facsimile pages, there are over 160 images, reproducing for the first time all Aubrey's horoscopes, pedigrees, coats of arms, and topographical sketches as they are found in the manuscripts. The text respects the mise-en-page of the manuscript and its status as an incomplete and heavily revised work-in-progress while presenting an edited, rather than a diplomatic, text. The commentary presents extensive new research on manuscript sources including much material not previously known to be Aubrey's or associated with him. It also reflects the state of current scholarship. Each life is introduced by a headnote placing the life in context. This gives the dates and sequence of composition and an account of Aubrey's relationship with the biographical subject, the circulation of knowledge of that subject in Aubrey's circle, and a full account of Aubrey's notes on the subject of the life in other manuscripts and correspondence. Aubrey's biographical informants also have a long note, as do uncompleted or missing Lives.

Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, "A Rossetti Family Chronology" breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the "Chronolgy" deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the" Author Chronologies" series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.

'So compellingly personal you feel you're looking over her shoulder as she sits down to write' New York Times 'Electrically entertaining ... Funny, generous, spirited and kind' The Times This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a memoir both wide ranging and deeply personal, overflowing with close observation and emotional wisdom, told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth.